Business Bullets - Operations

What is the single most important strategic sales activity that, if applied consistently by your business, would have the greatest impact on your growth? I've just finished delivering a great Sales Secrets Academy to a cracking customer of ours and once again the outcome from one of the group exercises highlighted this exact need -

To ruthlessly focus solely on the single most important sales activity to accelerate growth.

As a growth business you should develop a singular focus on the key sales and business development activity that has the potential to drive the most amount of growth to your business and profit to your bottom line.

In order to achieve this you MUST also be prepared to STOP phaffing around with other business development things that you think you should be doing, that actually add little or no value.

For example as part of an exercise with a client of mine to map the entire pre & post sale client journey exercise, a massive discussion developed in the pre-sales group around the marketing activities they currently do or think they should better or more of.

Meanwhile the group mapping the post-sale journey, realised just how many opportunities they were missing to further penetrate other areas of their blue-chip clients through better long-term relationship building and structured Account Management. (And 'Yes' this can be mapped and added to your business as a template for everyone to follow).

The outcome was that they identified the 12 key game-changing clients, all of which they already have some form of relationship with, that they should solely focus on to generate new work and higher sales order value.

This single activity, completely outranked some of the other lead generation activities, in this case, pre-sale, such as building a greater presence on social media or some of the advertising campaigns and exhibitions they had previously attended.

So here are our 5 steps to developing a company wide ruthless sales focus;

Step1: Understand what you do currently - Map out your client journey pre & post sale.

Step 2: Brainstorm how that could be refined to reduce cost of sale and increase client satisfaction

Step 3: Overlay this process with the desire to attract and gain return sales value of your ideal Client Avatar. i.e. who is your target customer.

Step 4: Decide on the key sales activity that if consistently applied in your business for the next 90 days, would step-change your organisations growth

Step 5: Assign resource and refine your process to include this activity and monitor it on an ongoing basis. For example, add it as a recurring agenda point to your weekly/daily sales meetings.

Ensure everyone understands the importance of this activity over others. If needs be encourage them to complete a Time & Motion study to ensure they are giving this priority the proper amount of attention.

Business success doesn't come about in 1 day following 1 'right' action, it comes from a group of highly focused, highly committed people doing a lot of smaller growth building activities on a consistent basis over a sustained period of time.